The concept of Open Badges immediately struck a chord with me because I could see where they would have been of benefit to me during a particular period of learning and a change in career. This is a post from early 2012, when I was just beginning to explore the concept of Open Badges.

Article on the JISC CETIS wiki about a session at their 2012 conference on open badges by Doug Belshaw and Simon Grant. I've been liaising with Doug about open badges and really like the way he puts the concept across. Access presentations by Doug and Simon, as well as feedback on discussions by participants at the conference and other useful resources.

This is quite a technical post on developing open badges, in particular focusing on badge validatation (which will clearly be required to check that a badge is genuine and issued from the issuer it says it's from to the issuee). You can see an example of what an open badge might look like and how verification might work.

"Last week I had the opportunity to work with Brian Brennan, who is the technical lead on Mozilla’s Open Badges project. One of the problems that interested me during the work week was validating open badges.

...

I built a demo that showed off in-browser verification of badges. I’d love to see the badge spec continue to evolve, and become even more robust. The next step is signing badges is going to ensure that they can’t be tampered with. It should be interesting to verify that inside the browser. It’d also be good to switch to the ‘iTXt’ PNG chunk, which is designed to hold international text, such as URLs."

I found this a useful article on badges. It covers the DML Open Badges competition and provides a range of examples of where badges are currently being used to credentialize learning and hard and soft skill, as well as considering implications for accreditors and employers.

What are conditional activities? Since the introduction of Moodle 2, it has been possible for users to track which activities/resources they have completed. This means that resources/activities are ‘aware’ ...

Ideas and advice on how to automatically issue digital badges in Moodle. Currently, they are not Open Badges but it looks like the plan is to move across to them. Developments for issuing Open Badges from Moodle to Mahara are well underway.

'Michael frames badges as a disruptive force within higher education, provoking his readers (initially directed towards sociologists) to evaluate the assumptions and norms of traditional institutions to legitimize and certify knowledge and skills. As Michael writes, his paper "establishes the need to develop sociological explanations for recent developments of certification of skill and knowledge mastery as possible substitutes for, or supplements to, conventional college and university degrees."'

With developments in open assessment, open educational resources, open badges etc gathering pace, how to support consistent marking of evidence submitted for open assessment requires consideration. Rubrics can help to set out the learning outcomes and measurements for assessing work, and allow multiple assessors and / or assessors who do not know the person submitting evidence, to judge the work against. This article pulls together links to some example assessment rubrics and resources for creating your own rubrics.

Article outlining a winning proposal by UK based DigitalME for the MacArthur Foundation DML Competition. Supporter to Reporter is a real-life learning programme where young people take on roles of sports journalists, media producers and mentors - DigitalME will use the Mozilla Open Badges Infrastructure to assess and reward skills and competencies achieved.

I’m really excited that we were able to partner with SCVNGR to develop a badging system for this project. If the project gets funded, we’ll use an experimental design to evaluate the impact of integrating our badging system and related game dynamics into large lecture courses. As outcomes, we’ll measure differences in student engagement, attendance, and academic performance between the experimental group and the control group.

The Open Badges and Assessment forum is exploring how Mozilla's upcoming Open Badges framework might be used in education. This article, which focuses on inclusive practice, provides some potential applications of using open badges for rewarding and recognising skills / competence that would be harder to assess through current assessment practices.

"The "Moodle as Issuer, Mahara as Displayer" project will integrate Mozilla's "Open Badges" software to issue, manage and display digital badges in Moodle and 3rd party sites such as social media and also eportfolio systems - we'll develop a solutions for Mahara."

The validity of open badges is perhaps one of the key concerns raised when I discuss them. I think this article proposes some useful ways for considering this, focusing on how notions of credibility and reliability inform our perception of what is, or is not valid...

'The question of validity is posed fairly commonly.* It goes something like this, “How can we ensure that the badges have a sense of validity?” or “Who will vet them?” or “How will we know that they’re worthwhile badges issued from reputable sources?”

There is a good deal of subtext embedded in these seemingly simple questions. And bound into that subtext is an unwitting/unacknowledged acceptance of the sociocultural status quo. That tacit acceptance should be unpacked and considered. How does any organization achieve validity? How do standards become standards? When the landscape is unknown, how do you learn to trust anything?'

A few months back, we rolled out the Badges Competition Project Roadmap during our first grantee townhall webinar, a virtual opportunity for all 30 projects to share knowledge about designing and building their badge systems.

Why a project roadmap for grantee badge system design? No one-size-fits-all approach exists for building badge systems, but a roadmap offers useful guideposts to help thread knowledge and provide jumping-off points to spark ideas. Collaboration by difference -- especially the innovative type -- needs a blueprint that can then be adapted, tweaked, revisited, transformed, and yes -- even ignored.

DigitalMe, UK based winners of funding from the DML 'Badges for Lifelong Learning' competition, are looking for schools to engage with them on their award winning project, Supporter to Reporter...

'We will be developing an exciting new way to recognise and reward the skills young people develop by taking part in the award winning Supporter to Reporter programme. We know that through becoming a sports reporter, young people develop confidence, improved speaking and listening skills, teamwork and resilience, as well as the maturity to become mentors and pass on their skills to others. The DML open badges project will enable us to build a series of online ‘Medals’ which recognise and reward these achievements, which young people can use to demonstrate their skills to future employers.

We are looking for 5 Schools or Education Centres to work with us on this pilot project.'

Tim Riches, the CEO of DigitalMe, will be talking at the JISC RSC Scotland conference on the 8th June so if you are joining us there, you can find out more about the Supporter to Reporter programme http://bit.ly/KDgBTR

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